Ketamine rebuilds connections between neurons lost during stress / Boing Boing

Ketamine has been used as a calming agent for horses, an anesthetic for infants, a recreational drug and, more recently, as a surprisingly effective treatment for depression (approved by the US Food and Drug Administration last month). Researchers are now beginning to understand how ketamine works: by reconstructing connections between neurons lost during stress.

Chemical and technical news:

In a new study, researchers looked closely at neurons in living mice under chronic stress, a disease that models depression in rodents. They discovered that a dose of ketamine initially helped restore electrical activity and then restore the physical connections between neurons lost during stress (Science 2019, DOI: 10.1126 / Science. aat8078). The observations suggest that ketamine has both immediate and longer-lasting effects on the functioning of neurons in the brain.

The neuroscientist Conor Liston of Weill Cornell Medicine and his colleagues implanted a prism in the frontal region of the rodent brain that, combined with a specialized microscope that captures images at extremely high resolution, allowed them to observe in detail branches of nerve cells called dendrites over several weeks. They could even see tiny nubbins on the dendrites called spines, which form the synapses connecting the nerve cells.

Image: public domain link

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